Virgin Intercessor and Other Monastic Miracles

Abstract

Among the tales and legends that circulate in nineteenth-century Vienna, we find a number of stories that feature women monastics. These stories find their home among other urban tales that seek to explain the present by examining real or projected “events” of the past: the tower stories that we encountered in chapter 2, or stories of the discovery of Turkish attempts to tunnel under the city walls during the siege.¹ Most modern scholarship on legends has focused on questions of genre, content, or transmission, tracing themes and linkages to common sources. Scholarly work on the Himmelspförtnerin, a story in which a statue of the Blessed Virgin comes to life to cover up the absence of a nun who flees into the world but later returns penitent, for instance, traces the legend back to miracle collections of the thirteenth century, and connects it to parallel versions in Belgium, England, and Spain.² Such comparative accounts of legends, however, obscure the power such stories have as vehicles for construction of local community identity. As an analysis of Viennese story collections shows, nearly all such stories emphasize tangible local details of topographical place and of material culture. Moreover, nineteenth-century authors of legends typically adopt a multipart narrative mode that connects two or three discrete events with an envoy that connects the historical story to the present day.